Hacker News Reader

Comment by conductr | Hacker News Reader

I'm seeing all the comments about the $6m Twilio expense, but nothing commenting on how their cost per employee is $380,000 totaling $19m. I think they could optimize this easier if the will was there. I know HN is very SV/tech centric, and that number makes sense there given the run up of VC money, etc. but I'm willing to bet they could source talent from cheaper places and slash this in half; if they wanted to. Just an observation, not my place to tell anyone how to run their business, but for a nonprofit that is trying to drum up donations to fund their operations, I'd think they would want to be leaner.

View on HN

This number includes taxes, benefits, etc, not just raw salary.

Notably Signal employees do not get equity, so the salary must be higher to remain competitive.

Signal is probably the hardest class of product to build. Name an optimization/distributed systems problem, they probably have it. And quite literally, a Signal bug could jeopardize an activist/journalist’s life.

So for a <$200k salary and no equity, how many world-class engineers do you think you could hire?

I simply wouldn’t trust the product, if it had mediocre engineers.

I interviewed at Signal for a senior developer. They do not pay well. I didn't even get past the phone interview because they were nowhere near my range. No idea where the $380k comes from, executives maybe?

If you want to hire the best talent - engineering and ethics, you need to pay top dollar. 380k is senior engineer comp at most FAANG adjacent companies. It's not a lot.

This is SV tech logic that I mentioned. I’m just not usually of the opinion it’s necessary. There’s a lot of talent around the world. And I’d guess only a few really “top talent” folks are needed to build the unusual problems/cryptographic parts of their app. A lot of it could likely be build by an average dev with some oversight.

I say this as a person that regularly and successfully hires devs from low COL areas. I know the common pitfalls of it and know it’s completely possible to manage and get high quality outcomes. It requires a management approach that’s slightly different than having 100% top tier talent from high COL areas but it’s possible all the same.

Craftsmen's compensation is a non negotiable matter IMHO.

It's not someone's fault if they happen to live in a particular economic climate.

The real root cause isn't the engineering or infrastructure cost.

It is about people paying their fair share myself included.

I'd never advocate for unfair compensation. Only that what's fair is highly variable when the world is your potential labor pool. A lot of people and companies think or behave like only a few areas of the world produce quality software. It's absolutely false. I'd also want to question if a company full of Master Craftsmen are needed (if that's what's implied by the $380k/employee). To keep with the construction metaphor, most labor on a typical construction site is Craftsmen supervising unskilled/lower skilled labor; otherwise cost would be a major issue (more than it is already).

Are you the same kind of people that think that NGO workers should work for free or for a small wage that is not representative of the market wage for their positions?

No, I’m the type of person who thinks tech salaries are bloated in certain areas and certain companies and that does not follow the distribution of talent. It’s followed the distribution of VC money and profits of large companies. The evidence of such is that the median software engineer in the US is in the low-mid $100s (depending on what source I want to believe it’s $110k-$140k). But I also believe that same talent can be sourced outside the US is many cases and for far less expense.

I also view most apps/tech as not very novel. It’s largely the same engineering “problems” that are known and well documented. A lot of it can be done by average developers and “top tier” talent isn’t usually needed other than probably the cryptographic components in Signal’s case. Scale is certainly a concern, but that is a familiar problem that’s has a lot of documentation solutions and approaches.

I could be wrong. Maybe they’re already doing this and it just happens most of their expense is going to a couple high paid execs. Could be that I’m underestimating the complexity as well. But I find my statements to be true in many cases. I can even point to the number of times I’ve talked to consultants and top tier devs about building things for me. What they would charge $1m for I can often piece together for less than $50k by hiring a few folks in low COL areas and then just spending a little effort refactoring their code to be as pretty as I like it to be; sometimes I outsource that too but the point is having a whole company of top tier talent isn’t usually necessary, it’s a choice. Just like believing that top tier talent only exists in the high cost tech hub cities is a choice more so than the truth.

This idea that an equivalent level of talent to SV is readily available in Indiana or Costa Rica for cheaper pay is deeply flawed.

OP didn't mentioned to slash salaries just by half not by 75%. Most IT people in western countries in Europe are not making even 200k per year. Even in London is hard to get 120k unless you maybe working as a contractor.

A lot of those SV talents are not american but migrated from europe or elsewhere - there are still talented people in EU who just simply don't want to move to USA these days even if salaries are at least 2x. You wouldn't have a problem finding real talent in eastern europe for 150k.

You're both contradicting yourself and proving my point.

Eastern Europe. For a non-profit privacy focused company. You're joking right?

It grinds my gears when people on a hacker forum lobby for hackers to make less.

When it’s people who are running a worldwide communications network on the cheap without getting hacked all the time? Absolute pros.

I don’t downvote, let alone flag, but I hate this comment.

Think from the perspective of the non profit. $19m/year is a lot of money to raise year after year from donations.

What’s the game plan if the donations stops coming in ?

Silicon Valley is not the only place to find engineers who know what they're doing. Some of us want to stay in our home country and/or don't want to jump through the hoops that American tech companies demand.

Well I don’t get paid to hack, it’s a hobby and sometimes I’m and entrepreneur so I don’t have the same bias as thinking all devs should be making $500k+. I actually think of cost controls and how to build more with less, so kind of polar opposite motives.

Cheap is also a relative concept. I have a guy on full time that I pay $1500 a month. It’s more than twice than he’s ever made in his life and he’s an excellent dev. If I needed to, I could find 50 more like him. Sure if I was FAANG scale trying to hire 30,000 of these people it might get tough. But, I could probably create an entire training program and just apprentice people for less than they paid new grads out of 2-4 schools they normally hire from.

Or they lobby for more hackers to make more, which can happen with a change in location with an overall reduction in budget

Reply on news.ycombinator.com